In August 2007, I went on a day trip trekking through Volcano National Park in Rwanda with a group of five tourists from Germany. We booked 6 mouths before our gorillas permit with Hakuna Matata tours ( www.hakunamatatatours.com ) an East African travel?company which organize safaris and tours in Rwanda, Congo DRC, Uganda, Burundi, Kenya and Tanzania. We walked for hours to track the Gorillas, with armed guards through the rainforest jungle, they had their talkies and they knew roughly where the gorillas had been the day before. These animals can only wander a kilometer a day - not far at all really - but when you consider that you have been walking for 2 hours already it’s a long way!

The walk was easy for most part, in other areas though it was steep and slippery, on the way out of the park, we were very late and it had closed, we had to cut across farmland, which was slippery and steep and very wet because at this stage it was lashing it down with rain!

You are in the jungle, there are no toilets. You are going to see a family of only 600 individuals left in the world. If you have a cold or are sick you might not be allowed to go. There is no smoking, no eating and no drinking around the gorillas - they don’t want our habits.

When you arrive there is only an hour with them - that’s it’s - an hour - and that hour goes oh so quickly! But for obvious reasons human time is limited with these amazing animals.

We sure didn’t want to overstay our welcome and so as soon as our hour was up and our guide had stopped making gorillas noises!!!? We quietly left the mountain gorillas in their own habitat - chewing on bamboo in the middle of the jungle - and trekked for 5 hours back to base.

This was such an amazing experience - I would recommend that if you are ever in this area of the world - its a must see without a doubt.

You can track the gorillas in Uganda, in Rwanda and in Congo DRC as well

by Aly Kant - congoguide@yahoo.com

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